BRIC man to call it a day

Goldman Sachs Group economist Jim O’Neill, who bound Brazil to Russia, India and China to form the BRIC investing strategy, will retire this year.
O’Neill, 55, will step down from his current role as chairman of the asset-management division, which he has held since 2010, the New York-based firm said in a statement. He joined the company in 1995 as a partner, became head of global economics, commodities and strategy research in 2001 and was added to the European management committee in 2006.
O’Neill, who is based in London, said in an email he hasn’t decided what he’ll do when he leaves Goldman Sachs.
O’Neill developed the BRICs theory following the September 11 terrorist attacks, after becoming Goldman Sachs’s sole chief economist, to reflect the waning influence of the US on the world’s economy. In the years afterward, it was central to Goldman Sachs’s economic outlook.
O’Neill recently published a book entitled “The Growth Map: Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond.” It updated and expanded his theory that the BRIC nations would join the US and Japan as the world’s biggest economies by 2050.
So popular has the BRIC term become that its leaders now meet for annual summits alongside South Africa. O’Neill remained a defender of the theory even as the economies slowed and the membership of Russia was questioned by some because of governance concerns.